Florida Museum Filled With Salvador Dali Art

April 17, 1988|By Jay Clarke, Knight-Ridder Newspapers.

ST. PETERSBURG, FLA. — No one ever fit the image of ``mad artist`` as well as Salvador Dali.

He painted limp watches, stark landscapes and double images. He cultivated a long, outrageous mustache. He wore outlandish clothes, on one occasion appearing at a press conference wearing a loaf of bread for a hat. He once kept an elephant and an ocelot as pets, and his eccentric antics as the guru of Surrealism were delicious items for the gossip columnists.

Today, Dali is a feeble recluse living in a tower he designed in his native town of Figueras, Spain. He will be 84 in May. But his paintings remain as startling as they were a half century ago when he created his ``paranoiac- critical`` school of painting and made Surrealism a household word.

Dali`s works are scattered in museums and private halls all over the world, but in St. Petersburg`s Salvador Dali Museum are gathered more than in any other single facility. The museum, founded six years ago, has 93 of Dali`s oil paintings, 100 watercolors and drawings, 1,300 graphics and a variety of other materials.

The works span a lifetime of art-oil paintings, pencil and charcoal sketches, sculptures, posters. There are canvasses he painted in Impressionist and Cubist styles, before he created his special kind of Surrealism.

The most eye-catching works, of course, are the Surrealistic ones, which Dali once called ``hand-painted dream photographs.`` In these, he used his skill as a draftsman to create detailed, realistic images that he then juxtaposed with unrelated objects and scenes. Among these are ``First Days of Spring,`` ``The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft Which Can Be Used as a Table`` and

``The Average Bureaucrat.``

``The Hallucinogenic Toreador,`` completed in 1970, is a large painting with one of Dali`s favorite devices-the hidden image. In the folds and creases of his depiction of Venus of Ampurias is contained the face of a toreador.

Three-dimensional hidden images are part of an amusing sculpture Dali called ``Nieuw Amsterdam`` (1974). This ``paranoiac-critical`` transformation of Charles Schreyvogel`s famous bronze bust of ``White Eagle`` is full of sly tricks. Viewed closely, the eyes become two Dutch merchants in red capes seated in real chairs. The nose becomes a Coke bottle, the lips a basket of fruit and the chin a table.

An exhibition of 34 of Dali`s Surrealist drawings, including his well-known ``Diner Dans le Desert Eclaire par les Girafes en Feu`` (``Dinner in the Desert Lighted by the Flaming Giraffes``), is on view through July 24.

The Dali Museum is the outgrowth of the collecting passion of A. Reynolds Morse and Eleanor R. Morse of Cleveland, who purchased their first Dali canvas in 1942 for $1,200 and eventually owned dozens of his works.

The Morse collection, which also includes 5,000 books, documents and films concerning Dali, was housed in Cleveland until 1980, when the Morses began to look for a more permanent home. The State of Florida agreed to renovate an existing building and the museum opened to visitors in 1982. It is just south of the University of South Florida`s Bayboro Campus.

SEEING ST. PETE`S DALI EXHIBIT If you go:

Admission: $3.50 for adults, $2.50 for senior citizens and students, children under 8 free.